In May, when I first blogged on our social vision, I also said that we'd publish more information about our site and platform roadmap. We're ready to start doing that now. They best way to begin the conversation is to first talk about our investments themes.

Think of themes as high-level things that we think are important. They are...

An Integrated Site Experience

MSDN and TechNet have evolved over time as a family of loosely connected function-specific sites, like the Library, Forums, Blogs, and Centers. While this has allowed each site/app to innovate around its core task, the overall site experience has become fragmented, making it harder than it should be to use, and lowering success rates with core tasks like Learning and Troubleshooting.  We are in the process of unifying all of our major sites and apps on a single set of services for UX and navigation, search, tagging, and identity. This means single sign on, centralized profile and recognition points, and better usability.

Better Discovery

It probably comes as no surprise that the #1 driver of customer satisfaction on MSDN and TechNet is simple discoverability. People are happy and satisfied when they find what they need. We are working towards improving discoverability from several angles including ongoing enhancements to our site search, site and center design, and the intelligent surfacing of "related" and "community recommended" content.

Enabling Social Connections

We are opening the sites up to the technical community so that people can better connect and share knowledge. This means enabling people to have rich identities on our sites, contribute content, find each other, form groups, and collaborate.

-Dan

As you have noticed with recent releases, we are in process of significantly redesigning the experience of our MSDN, TechNet and Expression sites, as well as adding many new social applications and capabilities. While we do this we are not ignoring mission critical need you have to efficiently download the bits you pay for as part of your subscription. We know how critical that is.

The team that builds the UX and interface for subscriber downloads is working to revamp the download experience and would love your feedback.  Please take a look at the current mock-ups. 

If you have a passion for this area and want to provide input or feedback - you can communicate with the team directly.

Your feedback in these areas is really useful and very influential, so thanks in advance!

 -Dan

As many of you have heard, at TechEd we are planning to preview our work on adding a Social Bookmarking capability for MSDN, TechNet and Expression. This is starting to get some attention on many blogs and other sites across the internet.  Many posts have been somewhat ambiguous as to the purpose of our Social Bookmarking capability and some have also speculated that this is an announcement that Microsoft is releasing a Social Bookmarking "product".

The bookmarking capability that will be previewed at TechEd is specific to MSDN, TechNet and Expression.  We have three primary goals for this.

1. Allow customers to save their favorite bookmarks for IT, Developer and Designer related content within Microsoft and across the internet. 
2. Allow customers to see what is viewed as important by their peers and experts in the community
3. Provide customers appropriate recognition for the contributions they make to the community using our social capabilities

This is not an announcement of a new Microsoft "product".  It is a follow on announcement to the blog post I wrote on May 14th where we announced our investments in MSDN, TechNet, and Expression as emerging social platforms.

Thanks,

Dan

To better support new social experiences in applications like Forums and Social Bookmarks, we are investing in a new Social Platform, which will provide centralized services for User Profile, Recognition, and Tagging. By centralizing these services, MSDN and TechNet will put the individual customer at the center of the site (network) experience, increase discoverability of people and resources, and provide an integrated customer experience across the entire family of MSDN and TechNet applications.

For example, by using a single user profile across Forums, Bookmarking, and Code Gallery, a customer will only need to sign in once to engage with all those applications, and contributions made within each application will all be recognized in the same user profile. Likewise, a single tagging service allows us to improve discovery and navigation by providing customers with feeds of various resources (e.g., Code Samples, Centers, Library Articles, Forums Posts, Bookmarks, etc.) filtered by tag.

Currently the team is in the process of integrating various applications like Code Gallery and Library with the Social Platform.

We are committed to public APIs for the Social Platform and in the future we envision integration scenarios with other Microsoft sites as well as sites across the internet. 

In the next couple weeks I will publish our roadmap and/or prioritized list of platform features and capabilities so that you have a good idea of what is happening and the relative importance as we build out the platform.

I am Dan Truax – General Manager at Microsoft for a few major online customer web sites including MSDN, TechNet, Expression, and CodePlex. If you would like to know more about me, click here.

I decided to start this blog because we are in the process of making some major changes to MSDN and TechNet. Going forward, and especially now, we want to have a much more direct and transparent discussion with you and make sure we have your feedback as we go along.

The biggest change I'm talking about is that we're beginning a process of re-inventing MSDN and TechNet as community-driven sites where customers are at the center of the experience, and social experiences enable their success.

Our vision is to be the largest and most vibrant online community for developers and IT professionals, enabling easy connections to the best resources and most knowledgeable people from Microsoft and the global community.

That means we're opening up the sites to much more direct participation and contribution from the global developer and IT community. Ultimately that means two significant changes:

1.       MSDN and TechNet will include content, samples, scripts and code that are created and contributed by our customers in addition to what is developed and authored by Microsoft.  

2.       Content, whether customer- or Microsoft-created, will be prioritized for placement and discoverable largely by customers through social activities such as tagging and rating.

Going forward, I will be using this blog to share more details on our direction and update you on the progress we are making. 

We want your input and feedback - here are two ways you can do that: First, is to respond to this blog.  The second is that we have created new forums to allow Q&A and discussion on the future of TechNet and MSDN.  You can access those forums on MSDN Forums and TechNet Forums.